The market for displays having touch-screen functionality is rapidly growing. As a result, a variety of sensing techniques have been developed to enable displays to have touch-screen functionality. However, the existing techniques each have some type of performance disadvantage for specific applications that results in significant added cost to the manufacturing of the display.
Touch-screen functionality is gaining wider use in mobile device applications, such as smart phones, e-book readers, laptop computers and tablet computers. In addition, fixed displays, such as for desktop computers and wall-mounted screens, are getting even larger. This increase in display size is accompanied by an increase in the display cost when using a conventional touch-screen technology, such as projected capacitive touch (PCAP) technology.
Consequently, there is a need to minimize the overall thickness and weight of touch-screens for the wide range of applications, from the smallest hand-held devices to the largest displays. Moreover, there is also a need for touch-screens to have more robust functionality, such as improved touch position accuracy, fingerprint immunity and multi-touch capability while controlling costs.